Monthly Archives: April 2015

The next meeting of the Androscoggin Beekeepers Club (ABC) will be held Wednesday, April 8 at Edward Little High School in Auburn. Club business will be conducted from 6:30 PM to 7:00 PM. This month we will be treated with a pair of speakers giving the presentations “Pollen and Nectar Nutrition for Bees” and “Mapping How Wild Bees Use Maine’s Landscape” from 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM.

Our April speakers will be Megan Leach and Brianne Du Clos. Megan and Brianne are both graduate students in the Ecology and Environmental Sciences program at UMaine Orono. Both scientists work as part of a large research team that studies both pollination of the wild Maine blueberry crop and native bee conservation.

Megan is particularly interested in plants and plant-insect interactions. She notes: “Plants and insects have so much influence on our daily lives, most of which we don’t regularly think about or even know about.” Megan’s research and the topic of her talk focuses on pollen and nectar nutrition and the influence they have on bee foraging behavior.

Brianne, a biology graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Superior, received her MS from UMaine in Forest Resources in 2012. Her present research focuses on landscape ecology–specifically how wild bees use the landscape around blueberry fields. Megan’s presentation will describe a mapping tool for landscape analysis of pollinator habitat.

Megan’s and Brianne’s ABC sponsored presentations are open to the public.

Now that everyone who went into the winter with bees has had a chance to check for survivors, we’d like to take a poll of colony survival numbers for the 2014-2015 season. If you can’t make the club meeting next week, it would be great if you could send an email to worker@androscogginbeekeepers.org with:

Your Town

Number of hives that went into the Winter of 2014-2015

Number of hives that survived until the Spring of 2015.

When the numbers have been tallied following next Wednesday’s meeting, I’ll post them on our website.